IBM Operational Decision Manager vs. Oracle Discoverer (discontinued)

IBM Operational Decision Manager can be used to manage complex business processes with less use of IT infrastructure and more use of centralized decision making. Decision-making depends on a logical framework and the creation of commands for better futuristic decisions with less time consumption and more precision and accuracy. IBM's Operational decision manager application is well suited for such scenarios where complex processes have to be streamlined.

Incentivized

Discoverer is well suited as a reporting tool where data integration doesn't play a major role. Discoverer suits very well situations where a user has to run a query every day. Discoverer reports can be scheduled and the user can just view the data instead of running the query manually. Also, Discoverer takes away the pain of managing the database credentials. Discoverer is not well suited to situations where the whole enterprise wants to view the same dashboard. Discoverer is more of a departmental BI tool. Discoverer doesn't offer many options to integrate data unless one has to create and handle integration using PL/SQL.

Incentivized

• Excellent stability and performance, as well as the possibility to deploy more quickly.
• Simple but effective web-based user interface that enables us to make direct updates to our policies or rules.
• Effective rule Execution Server, which allows us to assess the rules and their performance
• After the rules are delivered, business users can make changes and keep them up to date without having to know a lot about technology.

Incentivized

• SQL friendly which allows for fast adoption for those users who know how to write in SQL. This makes integration with other programs much easier.
• Accessing data is very fast even with larger data sets.
• The layout is clean and organized similar to a spreadsheet which allows for easier viewing and analyzing of the data.

Incentivized

• Business rule application development available only in Java, .net, and Cobol.
• Integration supports with legacy system need to be improved (Mainframe).
• Migration to latest -version (iLog JRules to ODM).

Incentivized

• There is always room for more scalability and optimization of performance.
• Oracle BI changes a lot from version to version. A smoother transition into a new version would be very helpful.
• Oracle BI's reporting tool is a little hard to use at first. The UI/UX of the tool can use improvement.

Incentivized

When compared to other vendors in the business rule management system, IBM Operational Decision Manager stands out in dimensions of rule engine capabilities, deployment flexibility, and ease of maintenance. It offers a wide spectrum of configuration options to build applications that can be used by developed by technical and non-technical/business users.

Incentivized

Discoverer was already in place when I joined the company so I was not involved in the selection process. However, I have been involved in the review of Discoverer as compared to alternatives including Business Objects, OBIEE, and SSRS. On a cost benefit analysis Discoverer always came out on top. Changing to another tool never provided enough additional functionality to overcome the cost of conversion and ongoing maintenance.

Incentivized

• It has a positive impact as it provides a great way to define business rules, execute them, update them, manage different versions of rules.
• Depending on the complexity of the applications, you can have thousands of rules.
• It provides a nice way to test the rules, run simulations with different scenarios, different scales of requests and verify the decisions, performance, etc., and that helps a lot.
• Since the decisions can be exposed through REST interface, it makes it very convenient to integrate with different applications, applications using different technologies.
• The Business console makes it easy for business users to be able to define, modify rules and not have to depend on IT to do a lot of that work. This helps in bringing the time to change and use the rules to be very short as well as lets IT do more IT related tasks and provide better value to the organization.

Incentivized

• We have used Discoverer to respond to state sales and use tax audits and saved the company more than the cost of the product. Discoverer has thus assisted in our objective of managing costs.
• Discoverer is used to provide reports for EEOC reporting assisting our goal of complying with all government requirements.

Incentivized